Bose vs Bauhn/Aldi Noise Canceling Headphones

March 25, 2010 | etbe

Overview

The German supermarket chain Aldi has been running in Australia for 8 years now [1]. Their standard practice for a long time has been to offer regular special deals on a few items of consumer electronics every week, my chocolate fridge is one thing I bought from Aldi [2].

Today Aldi have started selling Noise Canceling Headphones [3]. These headphones are badged by Bauhn – but that name is apparently applied to random products from cheap manufacturers, it may be an Aldi name that is applied to stuff that they sell. The headphones cost $69AU which is really cheap. But the deal will probably end in less than a week when stock runs out.

Noise canceling headphones can be used in server rooms and other noisy environments. Every company that has a server room should buy a few sets. One of the features of noise-canceling is that it works best on low frequencies and on regular sounds – it specifically doesn’t block human voice well. In some noisy environments it will be easier to hear people talk if you wear such headphones!

Noise canceling headphones are also very useful to people who are on the autism spectrum and other people who get more annoyed by noise pollution than average people. I have been wearing my Bose headphones on public transport and when walking around in the city, this not only stops traffic noise but it also helps to avoid people thinking that I want to talk to them.

Features

The first picture shows me wearing the Bauhn NC headphones, it’s from the right to show the controls for the built-in MP3 player. I have not yet tested the MP3 functionality. It appears that as the controls are one power button, buttons for next/previous track, and for controlling the volume. This is fairly poor for MP3 functionality, ideally you would want to have a display to see a list of tracks, maybe have directories to store files, etc. I guess this could be a convenient feature on occasion, but you wouldn’t buy the headphones for the MP3 functionality.
The next two pictures show a comparison of the Bauhn headset with the Bose QC-15 headset that I bought last year [4].

The cases of the Bauhn and Bose devices are almost exactly the same size and of a very similar shape, the Bose case is tapered and indented and also has a finer weave on the cloth covering – it looks much nicer. Both devices come with an adapter for an airline socket and with a detachable cable. They also both have pouches attached to the inside of the case with velcro. But the Bauhn headphones come with an adapter for the 6.5mm TRS connector which could be convenient if you want to plug them in to a larger amplifier, the basic connector is 3.5mm in both cases. The Bauhn device uses a standard TRS connector at the headphone end while the Bose QC-15 use a special connector that matches the shape of the headset and which has a TRRS plug (to cater for the high/low volume switch), so it seems that a damaged Bauhn cable could be replaced cheaply while a replacement Bose cable would have to be purchased from Bose (presumably at great expense and delay). The Bauhn case also has a velcro attached pocket for storing business cards (or maybe a name tag or something).

The supplied cable for the Bauhn is described as being 5 feet long – which isn’t quite long enough to reach a tower PC that is sitting on the floor. The Bose has a cable that is about a foot longer (maybe 6 feet total), but due to the non-standard connector you can’t replace it. I presume that I could easily buy a 4 meter cable for the Bauhn headphones, but I could of course buy an extension cable to use with the Bose.

Bose advertise the QC-15 headphones as having 35 hours of battery life from a single AAA battery. Aldi advertise the Bauhn headset as having 5 hours of battery life when NC is turned on – and they use two AAA batteries. It’s widely regarded that rechargeable batteries don’t last as long as the batteries used for estimating the battery life (which presumably are the most expensive long-life batteries available). I’ve found a single rechargeable AAA battery to last well over 5 hours in my Bose headphones, so it seems that battery life is considerably worse for the Bauhn device.

One feature of the Bauhn device is that it can be used without any batteries for playing external music. The Bose headphones can’t be used at all without a battery. So while the Bauhn will use the batteries faster it will at least be usable when the batteries run out. But if you are buying headphones for the purpose of avoiding noise then the Bose headphones are simply better.

Comfort

The Bose headphones have significantly deeper ear wells than the Bauhn – about 23mm vs 18mm. If your ears stick out more than 18mm (as mine apparently do) then this is a good reason for choosing Bose.

The Bose headphones are a tighter fit, the spring that pushes the ear-pieces together is stronger. But they have better padding so this doesn’t cause me any discomfort. Also the Bose headphones have better passive noise reduction due to having a more snug fit around the ears. I’ve worn my Bose headphones on a flight from the US to Australia with hardly a break and they were quite comfortable – I would never want to do that with the Bauhn headphones.

Noise Reduction

I tested the Bose and Bauhn products against three noise scenarios, external music, an air-conditioner, and a car engine.

The Bose headphones made good reductions of the noise from the external music (Numb by Linkin Park) and the air-conditioner. The Bauhn headphones did little to stop Linkin Park and was not very effective against the air-conditioner noise. I think that this is largely due to the lack of passive noise reduction, the air-conditioner in question makes little vibration noise and the sound of rushing air is generally immune to active noise cancellation. Both headphones were very effective when in a car with the engine idling. The engine noise of vehicles seems to fall in an ideal frequency range for active cancellation.

Music Quality

When listening to Youtube music played on my Thinkpad I could not notice any quality difference between the two sets of headphones. I did notice that the Bose headphones seemed to have a greater response in the higher frequency range, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one set is better than the other. Maybe if I was listening to FLAC0 encoded music that I had personally ripped from a CD then I would notice a difference. But for most people the Bauhn music quality should be good enough.

Design Quality

The Bose product is solidly designed, while the Bauhn product appears cheap in every way. Opening the battery compartment on the Bauhn headphones is difficult and if you do it wrong you could easily break the lid off, I expect that every set of Bauhn headphones that is used by children will be broken in a small amount of time – but it should still be fully functional with a broken lid. The matt finish of the Bose headphones should hide minor scratches much better than the shiny Bauhn headphones. The Bauhn headphones also have lower quality plastic parts, it appears that the molds used were designed cheaply and without adequate care to prevent marking the final product.

The design flaws that affect usage of the Bauhn product are the shallow ear wells, the poor fit of the cushions around the ears (which is probably mostly due to a weak spring pressing the ear cups to the wearer’s head), and the battery compartment lid which is difficult to open and appears prone to breakage. The other flaws are all cosmetic.

I wonder whether the Bauhn product was made by one of the big name manufacturers who deliberately reduced the quality to avoid competing with their more expensive products. It seems that the major flaws could have been corrected at design time with almost no increase in manufacturing costs.

Recommendations

If you can afford the BoseÂ® QuietComfortÂ® 15 Acoustic Noise CancellingÂ® Headphones then they are really worth the extra expense, I have no regrets at all about spending about $320US (including tax) on my Bose QC-15. The Bauhn product is good for when you want something cheap, for example a set to be used in a server room, or for the use of children. I bought a Bauhn headset for a friend who is a pilot, he spent $1,100 on a noise-canceling headset for his plane but had never got around to buying one for recreational use – I expect that he will allow his children to use his new Bauhn headphones, if they get broken it’s only a $69 expense.

The second cheapest NC headphones I’ve seen on offer in Australia is Harvey Norman selling Phillips HN-110 Noise Canceling Headphones for $100AU [5].

Amazon sells Philips HN 110 Folding Noise-Canceling Headphones for $50US but doesn’t seem to ship them outside the US (at least not to Australia).

JB Hifi also has some NC headphones on sale in Australia [6], but they are more expensive at $219 for AKG and $319 for Sennheiser. Also the models they sell are on-ear which means that they will inherently have very little passive noise reduction – and will also annoy anyone who doesn’t like having their ears squashed.

If I was buying NC headphones for my own use and didn’t want to spend $300US then I would either buy the Philips HN 110 Folding Noise-Canceling Headphones from Amazon and get a friend in the US to post them to me or I would buy them from Harvey Norman.

But the Bauhn product is good if you want cheap headphones to stop engine noise and give reasonable quality when playing music.

Will Aliens be Alien?

February 15, 2010 | etbe

The Telegraph has a silly article titled “Aliens are likely to look and behave like us” [1]. It’s based on the ideas of Professor Simon Conway Morris [2] who is a big fan of evolutionary convergence. He seems to believe that humans evolved in a way that is close to optimal and that aliens would have to evolve in a similar manner. The article’s claim that aliens will look and behave like us has three flaws, one is assuming that humans are the ideal form for space travel, another is the significant possibilities for vast objective differences between species, and the final one is the human tendency to regard small differences as being really significant.

The Arrogance of Assuming that Humans are Ideal.

It seems extremely arrogant to assume that humans have the ideal form for performing tasks that we have not yet performed – such as traveling to another star system.

To assume that it is certain that humans will colonise the stars is also extremely arrogant and foolish as well, I think that a significant amount of money should be devoted to existential risks that we face. People who believe that humans will inevitably colonise the stars (probably because God told them – there’s no other reason for such certainty) will tend to oppose taking prudent measures to reduce the probability of failure.

We should also consider the possibility that a human society that colonises another star system at some future time might be so different from us that we regard them as alien.

How Might Aliens be Different?

It seems to me that one problem with the theory of convergent evolution (as applied to different planets) is that evolution doesn’t seem to work in big steps. It seems to me that for an increasing portion of the jobs in our technological society there would be a benefit in having four arms and two legs, and maybe having more than four fingers on two of the hands. But evolving a bone structure that makes four arms useful is not a minor tweak so it seems unlikely to happen naturally – we might be able to genetically modify humans to have four arms and two legs with some future technology.

I can’t believe that four limbs is the optimal number for every mammal, amphibian and reptile (apart from the legless ones), that two legs plus two wings is the optimal number for every bird, and that six legs is the optimal number for every insect. I also can’t believe that two arms and two legs is the optimum number for every primate with the only significant difference in limbs being the primates that possess a prehensile tail. Evolution doesn’t produce perfect creatures, what it does is to produce creatures that tend to be slightly fitter than their ancestors. So even if there was an optimal form for a species that develops interstellar-craft, there would be no reason to assume that humans have such a form even if we had developed interstellar travel.

I think it’s relatively safe to assume that aliens would have two eyes (stereoscopic vision is a significant advantage), but apart from that I don’t think we can assume much about their appearance. For example I don’t think that there’s any inherent reason why creatures as intelligent as current humans could not evolve from octopuses – 8 arms would be quite useful for operating machines.

Aliens that spread beyond their own home planet don’t have to be optimal for such tasks, they only need to become the dominant species on their planet, develop decent technology, and then want to leave their planet. A species that took 100,000 years to achieve what humans have achieved in the past 100 years might not be considered optimal – but it might still be able to eventually launch interstellar craft. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that aliens would have to be as intelligent as humans to do that. But it does seem most likely that any aliens who manage to get here would be more intelligent than us.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond has a really interesting analysis of how human history was determined by geography and the availability of plants and animals suitable for domestication. Part of the explanation for the apparent lack of intelligent aliens could be planets where the dominant species was stuck in a situation like that of the people of New Guinea, the lack of plants and animals suitable for domestication prevented their society from developing. A stone-age human civilisation could potentially be stable for millions of years.

The article says “Extra-terrestrials might not only resemble us but have our foibles, such as greed, violence and a tendency to exploit others’ resources“. Well for starters a species that can displace all other contenders to become the dominant species in their planet would have to be capable of greed and violence. So that is probably correct but is not really going out on a limb.

Physorg.com has a short article describing the benefits of sexual reproduction in terms of the rate of accumulation of harmful mutations [3]. So it seems that sexual reproduction is most likely among intelligent aliens. But I don’t think that there is any reason to assume that aliens couldn’t be hermaphrodites. The Telegraph article claims that “Star Wars and Star Trek could be more accurate than they ever imagined in depicting alien life“, but given that Star Trek has avoided homosexuality even when demanded by the plot it seems that whatever aliens do in the bedroom would be way outside the range of activities alluded to in Star Trek. It seems that almost all sci-fi has aliens that are less “alien” than a significant portion of the human population. I think it’s safe to predict that if we should meet aliens they will not look like humans wearing cheap make-up or rubber suits – that has more to do with the budgets assigned to movie studios than any claim to potential realism.

It seems most likely that a society capable of developing space travel would need a great deal of training for it’s young before they become self-sufficient. Species of animal that abandon their eggs and hope for the best seem unlikely to succeed in doing that. I think that this implies that a pair-bonded species that spends an extended amount of time raising their young is most likely to succeed.

Perceptions of Aliens

Vulcans are widely regarded as being on the Autism spectrum. So it seems that having some similarities in personality to about 1% of the human population is enough to convince most human viewers that the character in question is an alien. A Google search for such things just turns up many references to people on the Autism spectrum who feel like aliens – which incidentally is the source of the alias ETBE [4] that I used for more than 10 years before being diagnosed as an Aspie. Star Trek aliens aren’t actually very alien by human standards!

Given the repeated demonstrations of the general human inability to recognise the psychological similarities in people from different countries or racial/ethnic/religious backgrounds it seems likely that few people would recognise aliens as being at all similar to us. As so many people are unable to recognise the fundamental similarities in people who happen to have a different skin color I can’t imagine many people immediately regarding beings that look like octopuses as having human traits.

Could an eusocial organism (such as bees or ants) develop space travel? It seems to me that most people wouldn’t regard humans who act in a manner that resembles ants (such as the Borg Collective) as being “like us”. The possibility of an eusocial race evolved from humans is explored in Coalescent: A Novel (Destiny’s Children, Bk. 1) by Stephen Baxter (and more briefly in the sequels).

Probability

The universe is a large place. Making a specific prediction about the first alien species that we might encounter might make some sense. But given the potentially billions of species that might be out there we should assume that some of the more improbable forms are represented. Claiming that anything in particular is impossible seems very rash.

Also anyone who makes claims about what evolution “should” do seems to have missed the point. What evolution does is to give rise to species that tend to be a better fit for the environment. Different environments result in different creatures. We can try and predict what creatures might evolve, but we don’t get to say that things “should” happen.

I’m an Aspie

November 8, 2009 | etbe

I’ve recently been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (AS) [1]. Among other things this means that I am genetically predisposed to have an interest in solving technical problems and give lectures about how I solved them, but that I tend not to be a “people-person”.

AS is generally regarded as an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but there is a lot of debate among the experts about the exact relationship. Some people (such as the psychologist who assessed me) believe that AS is a synonym for High Functioning Autism (HFA), however one theory I’ve heard is that HFA people are more sensory oriented and Aspies differ by being information oriented – in that case I would not be regarded as HFA. I’m not bothered by this issue, I’m sure that in a few years time the experts will have some consistent definitions for such things that most people can agree on.

There is no Boolean assessment for AS, the assessment is based on a sliding scale of number of criteria. People who are almost Aspies but don’t quite pass the test (or more commonly don’t get assessed because they don’t think they would pass) are sometimes referred to as Asperger Cousins (AC), this is a slang term that is not formally recognised but is often used in online discussions. I’m sure that a significant portion of the readers of my blog would regard themselves as being at least ACs if they investigated the issue. The test at Glenn Rowe’s web site [2] can give you an idea of how you rate by some criteria – but note that this is not at all conclusive and it’s based on the theories of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen [3], not all of which have general agreement. Leif Ekblad is running a project to analyse long-term changes to the Aspie score of adults [4]. The main quiz for that project seems quite popular for self-diagnosis, but again it’s not conclusive.

I think that diagnosing oneself for an ASD is not nearly as crazy as most things which might fall in the category of being one’s own psychologist, but I still strongly recommend getting a formal assessment if you believe that you are an Aspie. In Australia it costs about $600 and there’s a waiting list of about 3 months. Chaotic Idealism has an insightful post about the pros and cons of self-diagnosis [5], if you suspect that you may be an Aspie then I recommend that you read it before doing the tests.

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

Category Archives: Asperger